Al Swearengen, the foul-mouthed saloon keeper in HBO’s Deadwood, shares a nugget of wisdom in a rare moment of civility: “Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.” The line riffs on a Yiddish proverb, “Mann tracht un Gott lacht,” or “Man plans and God laughs.”
Great post! Another consideration (IMO) is that the Reagan administration’s federal tax and budget cuts, which were enforced on the states (far less federal money going to them), resulted in them cutting their own costs since they can’t print money. These state cuts hit public universities hard (and are ongoing). It took the universities a long time to figure out how to deal with their funding crisis, but many of the changes you identify are directly traceable to the solutions they settled on: corporatization, turning campuses into luxury communities to attract wealthier students; heavier reliance on big-ticket sports; increased dependence on research funding from the feds; unpaid peer review work; the transition from largely tenured (and expensive) faculty to less well-paid part-time untenured faculty; standardization with the aim of making assessment less expensive. These changes go farther back than just a couple of decades, but they have accelerated.
Ned, your memory goes back further than mine. This is quite insightful: "It took the universities a long time to figure out how to deal with their funding crisis, but many of the changes you identify are directly traceable to the solutions they settled on."
I have no notion of how universities maintained financial stability before the GI Bill (the biggest influx of federal money into the system, I believe), but I'm aware that Willa Cather bemoaned the shift to commercialism and highly paid football coaches at the University of Nebraska as early as the 1920s. The overall affordability might have been made possible by a spartan mentality, that academics was a no-frills enterprise, and students could be expected to endure some hardship while completing their studies. I suppose some universities might continue trying to outdo each other with posh facilities, but if there is to be a return to affordability it will require some sacrifices by all involved. I, personally, was quite willing to exchange higher pay for autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a professor. But as soon as the mission shifts away from knowledge and truth seeking to more transactional outcomes, the notion of sacrificing for a calling makes less sense. That would have to be restored, I think, for universities to regain their integrity.
It really came to a head when students started calculating ROI on their education, which means liberal arts can't possibly compete with a career in finance. I'm not sure who came up with that idea, but maybe certain programs (MBAs?) started it.
This only increases as cost increases. There was some of that judgment of the practical versus the frivolous when I was in college, but it was generally understood that the liberal arts provided a common foundation for everyone. Even people who gritted their teeth through Western Civilization or a literature survey understood the intrinsic value of understanding something about history or about national identity. That was because the institutions reinforced those values; the Latin words in their crests were not mere garnishes. There was a sense of an older tradition to which everyone belonged.
I've made this case many times, but the scene "The Carousel" from Mad Men shows the explosive value of true creativity. A superior metaphor, such as Don Draper's slide carousel (versus the "wheel"), can translate to financial profit. But there's no way to predict it; creativity fits the points of need to which it is applied. And so liberal arts ROI is always a little like that: it depends on the individual to seek out situations to apply their knowledge in innovative ways, and it depends on the particular exigencies of each of those situations.
Where do you come down on the 3-year undergrad program that seems pretty typical in European universities? Maybe that's possible b/c their high schools provide some of that foundational liberal arts education (IB programs seem pretty rigorous.) Then they take exams and get funneled into programs based on aptitude and interest. Seems pretty efficient. At first, I was horrified at the idea of 3 years vs 4 but for us, the buffer could be a couple years of community college -- where, let's face it, instructors are actually pretty dedicated to teaching and student outcomes. As opposed to some hotshot researcher who's only teaching to satisfy a tenure requirement.
I'm not categorically opposed to anything, but what you're describing sounds more like a transactional outcome than a mission-driven one. Sure, efficiency is great. But I can't count the committee hours I spent designing and revising a core curriculum that was effectively made obsolete by transfer credits. Then any assessment metrics measuring the effectiveness of the core were meaningless, because almost no one had completed the core in its entirety, the way it had been designed. If everything is just a requirement to "get out of the way," we're not talking about knowledge or truth seeking or anything related to intellectual growth. It's just a checklist.
I actually think it would be possible to preserve much of the traditional liberal arts while making reforms at the more advanced levels, years three and four, to prioritize internships. That's how each student might discover how to translate the value of an English or Theatre major into an industrial or nonprofit context -- before they have to actually join an applicant pool. There isn't really any problem with practical outcomes, so long as they don't replace the academic integrity of traditional disciplines. Study literature, history, language, religion -- know some shit -- and then start building some practical experience, growing a professional network, etc. It doesn't have to be zero sum either way.
I can't speak for all of Europe, or all opinions on the subject, but I have friends in Switzerland who bemoan that tracking into specialized career preparation starts really young there. It isn't so much that you take a final exam at the end of your (sometimes 13 instead of 12) years of public school to decide what you want to or can do; you might be locked into a vocational versus professional track already since 6th grade or so. And so it isn't only foundational liberal arts that students are better prepared in, it's also science, or economics, or whatever that student is expected to study at the next stage. So as Josh says, even more transactional than here.
I'm glad you also brought up community colleges. I started a career in IT/computer programming fairly late in life. My BA was in German and I had an MA in International Studies. After teaching myself some basic coding and working in telephone tech support for a few years I realized I needed to go back to school. I went to the College of Alameda (in Alameda, California) to satisfy some prerequisites. After having failed calculus as an undergrad, I was taught it by a guy who clearly delighted in being in the classroom; I also took a class in discrete mathematics and an intro course in computer science there -- all 3 courses were excellent. Penn State's Commonwealth campuses were held out as fulfilling our need for a community college system, but it hasn't worked out that way.
I started grad school in 1997. At that time, there were already students with a vulgar-Foucaultian point of view that there is no such thing as truth, only narratives or power. They viewed themselves as agents for change, and they believed that any invocation of truth served the status quo (capitalism, colonialism, etc.). No one was considering what would happen if the vulgar-Foucaultian view became generalized and people outside the academy, including conservatives, adopted it.
Thank you, Duncan. I started my MA in 1997, as well, and was immediately confronted by Derrida and Foucault. I'm not certain that Foucault is quite as bad as you say -- I quite like his Birth of the Clinic, which I used in my dissertation. But, yes, I struggled with the idea that power and social constructions were the only (relative) truths.
Ironically, John Ellis published his prescient "Literature Lost" in 1997. In it he argues that postmodern relativism was a smokescreen for exceedingly didactic agendas. The goal, he says, was to destabilize the existing power structure, after which there would be a frenzy of competition among different ideological groups, which would not, themselves, be relativistic at all. Anti-racism and MAGA are two sides of that argument.
I never developed this as a proper theory, but I did write a couple of seminar papers as a master's student exploring physical homeostasis as a counterpoint to postmodernism. That is, the body has a kind of grammar, a set of parameters for truth that determines when health spins beyond its usual fluctuations and into a danger zone of imbalance. Homeostasis isn't absolute or fixed, it is a state of flux and compensation for inevitable imbalances (fatigue, hunger, etc.). But health isn't completely relative. Sacrifice sleep for too long, and you crash. Sometimes immunity can't stave off illness, and homeostasis can't be restored. In that case, the result is death -- its own truth, but not one anyone would want to claim is as equally valid as health.
I really do think that something like homeostasis would be required for the university to regain its footing: a restoration of an intellectual commons where there could be flux and disagreement, but where those differences would not reach a level of rancor or rigidity that would push the whole enterprise into a death spiral.
I feel all of this. I don’t remember when Maryland quit the ACC to join the Big10 (are you kidding me??), but the video of their new athletic (read: football) facility is offensive state-of-the-art propaganda. Including a throne where guys can pose in ermine robes and crown while they’re being recruited.
Was just having this conversation about WTF happened to higher ed after the ‘80s, when it was still reasonably affordable. Your piece breaks it down nicely. Add to that the arms race of building fancy new crap like luxury dorms and fitness centers, to be competitive with other schools and aid in recruiting. And the enormous layer of middle management that’s ballooned since the ‘90s. And, you’re so right about assessments and rubrics. It’s all bullshit, beholden to the idea that if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter. I’m lucky our little unit is still very values-forward. And tbh, our university president is a solid guy (former engineering professor and dean) who cares about academics, not primarily a bean-counter.
We have vulnerabilities for sure. We’re an R-1 institution, which means heavily dependent on federal dollars. I don’t have high hopes.
You and Ned (above) have longer memories than mine. College was affordable for me in the 90s because of Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, but also because the sticker price was only about $12K a year. So summer work could subsidize the difference. Perhaps Ned is right that the Reagan cuts set many of the dominoes in motion.
Glad you have a solid president. That counts for a great deal. I hope his tenure exceeds the average. I didn't mention this, but high turnover at the executive level (~5 years for deans and presidents) also undermines institutional health. And when you have executives like Brian Rosenberg, with PhDs in the humanities, publicly saying that their dissertations contributed little to the world, the core mission is irreparably lost.
I've sometimes likened the current situation to a family where the children have lost all respect for parental authority and, consequently, for each other. There needs to be a commonly shared belief in the institution itself, and in a unifying mission, for anyone to buy into their role in the enterprise.
I have no doubt Reagan bears part of the blame. Most (many? all?) state constitutions require balanced budgets, so they had limited choices -- cut programs, raise taxes. My program has a similar percentage of "professional track" faculty - 75% of us vs 25% tenure/tenure-track. It was the opposite in the 90s when I first started teaching there.
Yikes -- it's difficult to develop a rich academic culture if everyone is looking over their shoulder for the next round of layoffs or so burdened with teaching load that they can't make time for research or even socializing with colleagues. I remember how easy it was to find casual spaces to talk about teaching when I first joined the faculty at a private college in Iowa. By the time I left, there were so many demands on everyone's time that even scheduling lunch with a friend seemed like too much of a slice of the day. People need to feel secure and have some room to breathe for them to bring delight to their teaching.
Good point. It's been such a slow creep that I hardly noticed, but you're absolutely right, it is hard to have purely social get-togethers, even though I really like my colleagues and would love to hang out. Nobody has the time.
Terrific post in response to all the recent op-eds about “the end of higher education.” These trends have been in the works for decades, as you and others here note. One of the reasons I’m so concerned about the use of AI tools for written work in schools is not because the tools themselves are bad. It’s because administrative pressure to make AI part of the curriculum comes on the heels of at least two decades of “standardization” of writing instruction with canned assignments. Now, learning to write an essay is often framed as a boring task that can be outsourced to a machine. Boring essay assignments, sure - but not the kind of essay writing that’s deeply linked to critical thinking.
Thanks, Martha. Yes, AI is one form of standardization or a retooling of humanities disciplines to fit corporate purposes. One excellent example I can offer of how advanced humanities study yields superior results to any bot is archival research. When I taught a senior seminar, I took my students to the Cather Archive in Lincoln, where they handled physical artifacts from her travels (postcards, sketchbooks, and more), saw typescripts of her novels with her partner's, Edith Lewis's, handwritten edits, read her last will and testament, and perused her film contract for "A Lost Lady."
None of this is available to ChatGPT, and so the arguments they made and the conclusions they drew from primary materials were their own. What is the practical application of archival research into the work of Willa Cather? It doesn't map clearly onto a job at Wells Fargo, but it does cultivate discernment, the ability to develop expertise in a short time, and the ability to make a persuasive argument that synthesizes nuanced and diverse information. There's value in that, but it's not predetermined or obvious.
I think many of these problems also have at their source the assumption that everyone must get a college degree to have a "good" job and be a "productive" citizen. There are lots of people who aren't interested in open inquiry about ideas, but would be excellent in a lot of jobs--including many white-collar desk jobs. Once universities were supposed to appeal to everyone, for the purpose of a particular kind of employment opportunity, it changed the product universities were selling from expanding one's own thoughts to enhancing one's own profit potential, with all the business values that implies. So of course we get the tyranny of spreadsheets reporting on deliverables in academia, once our framework becomes a business-values framework.
I wonder if this might be why this is less of a problem in European universities, which have different models for what university is for and how job training works. (The German system is a good example of one that provides lots of training for and specialization in trades, and where relatively few people go to university in pursuit of a "good job.") Or maybe the arrow of directionality points in the opposite direction: universities with their values existed for hundreds of years before Excel, and as a result had a better opportunity to mold the modern university culture to academic values, rather than be subjugated to business values.
I went to college to be a lawyer. There was no other reason that made sense to my working-class family in 1993. What I discovered was the life of the mind, and I claimed it rather stubbornly. That didn't make my life easier, but it did make it richer and somewhat easier to navigate social crack-ups like the one we're living through. Self-knowledge and adaptation are underrated qualities.
Perhaps you recall that my other path, which I very nearly chose, was stenography. That would have been far more lucrative than any other job I've held, and the top school for it in Denver, Colorado, offered me a full scholarship. It would have cost me nothing more than my own equipment. But the thought of that life crushed my spirit. I'd rather work with my hands.
I'm not an expert on the European model, but from what I hear, the same ills plague universities in the UK -- even in my beloved Prague, according to a senior professor I met while traveling there. Your last point is rather intriguing. But I think the older model still required some kind of subsidy, the way all serious art or research has -- it was just that the fundraising was considered a hidden necessity, not the core mission to trumpet from the rooftops.
To jump on the bandwagon that DEI went too far is easy enough and I know from personal experience not totally incorrect. But now its equal and opposite reaction will only do more damage. Meanwhile, I'm inclined to agree with Chris Hedges today ("Surrendering to Authoritarianism"). For all their shiny liberal credentials, Yale and other Ivy Leagues have always existed and still exist for this main reason: to produce a ruling class. Colombia's capitulation is best read in that light.
I think most of these issues, at their core, are a result of reduction of state funding. This applies to every state, although some more than others. Before states were first taken with the budget cutting hysteria of the 70s and 80s, a person could earn a degree from the UCal system for little more than the cost of books. Education was considered a public good. Pulling that funding away from states and externalizing the financial burden had predictable consequences. Higher tuition. The need to prove worth in the shrinking pot of money in order to compete for private dollars, all of which come with strings and agendas. The need for big donors, again, with agendas. For example, Phil Knight in Oregon is the single biggest private funder of education in the state. He also donates lots of money to Republicans. Other examples abound. The school choice moment, an excuse to privatize, privatize, and privatize without much, if any quality control oversight along with the homeschooling boom has meant exposure to complex issues that foster critical thinking is not mandatory. The advent of for-profit colleges: again, a result of the loss of state funding, affecting veterans and nontraditional students across the board. The Cuts in state funding are at the core of the labor issues, and to save money, state universities have left lines empty or filled them with adjuncts for a fraction of the cost and without traditional protections of TT faculty. I could go on forever. The death of a university education and everything that comes with an educated community to be seen as a public good worthy of tax dollars is at the core of everything. And you are right, Josh: this isn't new.
One more thing: the standardization of testing and curriculum as well as the increasing use of AI not only to write essays, but to grade them and to write up assignments are on this list, as well. No more public good worthy of tax dollars, only a tool to increase one's employment opportunities: why should states fund this? And why teach students how to think when thinking is not an asset?
The one place AI can’t touch is advanced writing and the novel thinking and synthesis of diverse sources it requires. In another comment I gave the example of archival research.
With regards to tenure, I like to describe one of my professors as being the prefect argument for and against tenure. His name is Kris Kobach, now Secretary of State for Kansas (and a graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School). He did not reveal his political leanings until he achieved tenure -- and virtually every other member of the faculty loathed him for his politics. Without the protection of tenure, he would have been fired purely for his political beliefs.
On the other hand, he knew that any criticism of him would be taken as political, and he abused that luxury. Classes would be canceled so he could make press conferences and news interviews. Instead of the standard essay exams, his finals were multiple choice to avoid any work in grading. Tenure was protecting a lazy and ineffective teacher.
(On a humorous note, several years ago he was sanctioned and required to take continuing education in civil procedure. Friends speculated that it was politically motivated. I simply replied "he graduated from YLS and worked as a professor before becoming an elected politician. When would he ever have learned something as prosaic as how to try a lawsuit? That's what graduates from third tier schools like where he taught do.")
Thanks for sharing -- powerful example. Everyone knows about the bad apples who abuse the tenure system. The question -- which I'm not sure can be answered anecdotally -- is whether Kobach is the exception or the rule.
My feeling is that tenure has been essential not only for academic freedom but also for financial security. Academics on average are paid so poorly compared to other professions that committing to higher ed requires enormous sacrifices: poverty wages during graduate school (and forfeited earnings while other peers are building wealth) and then compensation that often hovers around the minimum in MIT metrics for a sustainable livelihood. Academic families aren't able to survive on a single income in many places -- this is only true at R1 universities and then only for leading scholars. So the financial commitment that tenure represents provides a baseline of stability for people who sacrifice for a calling.
It makes zero financial sense to make all the sacrifices graduate school requires and then enter a year-by-year or 3-year renewable limbo. But the same can now be said of industry: in exchange for an exorbitantly expensive education, graduates must accept debt and dependency on corporate employers who offer no security, either. A family can relocate across the country, buy expensive real estate in Seattle, and then get laid off a year later by Amazon.
Not sure what the answers there are, but increasingly a lot of Americans exist in precarity or with a likely chance of precarity. This is one thing that tenure has prevented in the past.
Anecdotes certainly can't be a basis for policy, but in my experience, Kobach was the only professor I had (and I have two bachelor's in history and chemistry, a minor in Classics, and a law degree) who abused tenure to be a bad teacher. On the other hand, he was also the only professor who used tenure as a shield against unpopular opinions either; making snarky comments about Dick Cheney's hunting accident hardly constitutes intellectual bravery.
For the professors I had (and the one I know socially) tenure is completely about financial security, not intellectual freedom. My conservative tenured friend still has to dance around the eggshells of his woke students; at best, tenure lets him relax to demi-pointe from being on pointe. As we've seen, tenure is no protection from the hounds if they bay loudly enough for blood.
And I fully agree that the employment situation of university teachers is a disgrace. Glenn Reynolds has written that perhaps the reason so many people in academia and entertainment decry capitalism is because those two sectors are the most exploitative, least meritocratic, and zero-sum in the economy, and so people in those sectors assume everywhere else must be worse. I'm inclined to agree with him. Even law, which has first year graduates who can make $160K/year in the bowels of Big Law for partners who make millions or $25/hr with no benefits as document reviewers, isn't as exploitative as paying Ph.D grads a few hundred bucks a semester to adjunct. I could buy a cheap house as a document reviewer; no one is getting a mortgage as an adjunct.
The whole education system needs an overhaul, but I think it's important to be clear on what we're trying to accomplish. If the goal is simply to provide greater financial security to professors, that can be done without lifetime tenure -- signing professors for eight or ten year contracts would work just as well.
Good post. Just a question on a side issue here. You write “as if we could just go back to reading Paradise Lost the way it was taught in the 1950s and ignore the explosion of ethnic American literature in the last two hundred years. “ I’m not sure i quite understand this. In 1950 they didn’t read Milton like they did in 1920 nor 1870 etc. nor - I imagine- was Milton ever taught the same in the us and the uk etc. by the same token of course you can’t read Milton in 2025 as in 1950, and not just because of important scholarship since then, but because each generation relates to great works in its own manner. But what I frankly don’t understand is the emphasis on “ethnic literature” and why it should mean that we should stop reading Milton, or somehow *fundamentally* change how we read him in a way that isn’t encompassed in the general universalist observation about how each generation and society revisits great works in its own way?
An excellent question. I was referring rather unclearly to the expansion of the Western canon in the twentieth century and a gradual movement away from "the classics." You are right that Milton has been read differently at different times, but I don't think those differences have been so radical across places and times. There have been more recent movements to dispense with Western history altogether (see Reed College https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college-course-lectures-canceled-after-student-protesters-interrupt-class).
One of the outgrowths of the 1900s was reading multiculturally, sometimes reading against the grain of former classics, or applying newer lenses from gender studies or queer theory to older texts. So in that sense I don't think we can return to Milton in the way that conservatives seem to be advocating for, although just what Rufo and others mean by a "classical" approach to the humanities remains ill-defined. Certainly I am no fan of a strictly theory-based approach to literature. I meant only to highlight the difficulty of returning to or restoring an "intellectual commons" where differing views might peaceably converse. Many of these struggles over curriculum have become zero sum.
Not sure if that helps or confuses things further?
I agree 100% of this article, fantastic. As always, I focus on cost. Public colleges never should've been allowed to price themselves 40-50% past the rate of inflation. Yes, I know state budgets got cut, but don't price people out, especially the middle and lower classes.
Many pundits and presidents have proclaimed college as the key to success. If this is true, why do they make it so hard to afford? I still believe all state colleges and community colleges should be free to their residents.
Yes, quite right -- so many aspects of truth seeking only become possible if prohibitive cost is removed. That includes both rigorous academic experiences, such as archival research, that have practical byproducts but really require an independent integrity, as well as self-exploration and even learning as a form of play (why not take this elective class in theatre).
As I said in response to another comment, I think a great many students from both rural and urban places would be willing to accept much more spartan accommodations in exchange for learning opportunities. At my former employer, room and board were money makers for the college and were not covered by any form of financial aid. During graduate school I lived an incredibly ascetic life -- rice and beans, etc -- which I accepted at the time as necessary for the opportunity to complete my PhD. I'm sympathetic to the calls for better compensation for graduate students and have written about the financial sacrifices that PhDs make, some of which reverberate for a lifetime. But knowledge seeking and skill development do not require material comfort, and I am surprised that so few schools give any attention to this; we are told that there is no money for things like visiting authors or artistic residencies, but there is money for posh dorms and entertainment and other unnecessary add-ons.
If the university is to recover from the current attacks and its long demise, it needs to be more welcoming to students who don't need more than basic necessities to complete their studies.
Thoughtful and investigative post borne of your own experience. Like most, I don’t have answers to the questions—but of your key points I’d suggest that the costs/return are a primary driver of—and also outcome of—the other points. As you pointed out so well, the cost of the education doesn’t equal the quality of it—but rather points to the access created by it. Access to what?—the corporate and government gatekeepers mentioned in your other key point.
Thanks, Dee. There is another way of looking at it, which is Ned's point earlier in the thread: institutions were supported and encouraged to grow for many years with federal support, and the Reagan cuts created a void that led to the other choices. Just as a McDonald's cheeseburger is artificially cheap because commodity beef is subsidized (compared to grass-fed locally sourced beef), you could say that universities were artificially cheap -- or legitimately cheap -- for a time because of our collective support.
I don't think many universities can survive long with a crass revenue/expense calculus. Some disciplines, like the arts and humanities, have always required subsidy. Whether we think they are important enough to collectively support them is another matter, and the disciplines themselves have a responsibility to persuade the public of their usefulness. I think for many years the idea of a thoughtful person as someone who was literate, capable of interpreting complex texts and writing incisively about them, widely versed in history and culture, was widely celebrated. Even seen as a mark of sophistication.
But you're quite right that many universities are in the selectivity race, and what they are selling is a hyped up club membership.
Perhaps Reagan was the spark of some change way back then. Clearly it’s a more complex problem than can be blamed on a single President’s agenda of deregulation—but I guess it’s a convenient target. As we’ve seen recently, a federally supported education system doesn’t bode well for the quality of outcomes.
Anyway I liked how you presented the myriad challenges.
I beg to differ: the American university system has been the envy of the world only because of federal and state support. The more limited those funds, the poorer the entire system becomes. It's reached a broken state, no doubt, but it was not that way for your generation or mine.
This is correct. Every year, more and more universities from China, the UK, and other places move up the list of "best universities." I use quotes only because some of the criteria are pretty subjective. That said, it's clear as public funding drops, so does the prestige or American universities.
Very good post. On a somewhat related topic (apologies if you did write about it and I missed it) I would be interested in reading your thoughts on the infiltration of academia by the Chinese Communist Party. (Mainly through Confucius Institutes) This is one possible area where government and academia could overlap and maybe even clash, especially given a lot of the surprises of the last few weeks. One of the easiest things academia can do is distance itself as much as possible from the Chinese Communist Party; otherwise the government will have a ready reason to interfere in academia's affairs since one can genuinely cite national security in this instance.
I will answer your questions soon, I now finally have time to get to long overdue emails. I don't need to tell you that the life of a parent is busy! (Hope your children are all healthy and well, by the way!)
Felix, I have no grasp of what you're suggesting and no knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party in my own academic experience. A cursory glance at Confucius Institutes suggests that there aren't many, and that they have not recently enjoyed federal support. Perhaps there's more to it, but it's new to me.
Agreed with all of this--but I also think that one underemphasized cause of this might be a lack of TT faculty participation in shared governance and union work, where they actually have the tools to push back against the trends you identify. It can be really difficult to find any faculty who are willing to sit on, chair, and work on committees, and those who do aren't always committed to the vision of education you argue for. I don't know if this is the same at other institutions, but the sense I get from my current institution is that a lot of the corporatization happens because few faculty members are bothering to attend the (admittedly dull) meetings where these sorts of decisions are made. These problems aren't 100% the fault of faculty--but they aren't 0% the fault of faculty either. I wonder if some sort of groundswell of investment in shared governance might be part of the solution.
In a faculty position since 2012 and yes to all of the above. Especially the corporate takeover of higher education. Faculty keep losing in their fight against it.
Josh, you did a superb job of writing about the value of education. In my life, I hear and participate a lot about university education and what value it brings. ROI is essentially the discussion, and job placement. But in my limited experience, those who have sought education and life experience bring more life and purpose to their environments.
Great post! Another consideration (IMO) is that the Reagan administration’s federal tax and budget cuts, which were enforced on the states (far less federal money going to them), resulted in them cutting their own costs since they can’t print money. These state cuts hit public universities hard (and are ongoing). It took the universities a long time to figure out how to deal with their funding crisis, but many of the changes you identify are directly traceable to the solutions they settled on: corporatization, turning campuses into luxury communities to attract wealthier students; heavier reliance on big-ticket sports; increased dependence on research funding from the feds; unpaid peer review work; the transition from largely tenured (and expensive) faculty to less well-paid part-time untenured faculty; standardization with the aim of making assessment less expensive. These changes go farther back than just a couple of decades, but they have accelerated.
Ned, your memory goes back further than mine. This is quite insightful: "It took the universities a long time to figure out how to deal with their funding crisis, but many of the changes you identify are directly traceable to the solutions they settled on."
I have no notion of how universities maintained financial stability before the GI Bill (the biggest influx of federal money into the system, I believe), but I'm aware that Willa Cather bemoaned the shift to commercialism and highly paid football coaches at the University of Nebraska as early as the 1920s. The overall affordability might have been made possible by a spartan mentality, that academics was a no-frills enterprise, and students could be expected to endure some hardship while completing their studies. I suppose some universities might continue trying to outdo each other with posh facilities, but if there is to be a return to affordability it will require some sacrifices by all involved. I, personally, was quite willing to exchange higher pay for autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a professor. But as soon as the mission shifts away from knowledge and truth seeking to more transactional outcomes, the notion of sacrificing for a calling makes less sense. That would have to be restored, I think, for universities to regain their integrity.
It really came to a head when students started calculating ROI on their education, which means liberal arts can't possibly compete with a career in finance. I'm not sure who came up with that idea, but maybe certain programs (MBAs?) started it.
This only increases as cost increases. There was some of that judgment of the practical versus the frivolous when I was in college, but it was generally understood that the liberal arts provided a common foundation for everyone. Even people who gritted their teeth through Western Civilization or a literature survey understood the intrinsic value of understanding something about history or about national identity. That was because the institutions reinforced those values; the Latin words in their crests were not mere garnishes. There was a sense of an older tradition to which everyone belonged.
I've made this case many times, but the scene "The Carousel" from Mad Men shows the explosive value of true creativity. A superior metaphor, such as Don Draper's slide carousel (versus the "wheel"), can translate to financial profit. But there's no way to predict it; creativity fits the points of need to which it is applied. And so liberal arts ROI is always a little like that: it depends on the individual to seek out situations to apply their knowledge in innovative ways, and it depends on the particular exigencies of each of those situations.
Where do you come down on the 3-year undergrad program that seems pretty typical in European universities? Maybe that's possible b/c their high schools provide some of that foundational liberal arts education (IB programs seem pretty rigorous.) Then they take exams and get funneled into programs based on aptitude and interest. Seems pretty efficient. At first, I was horrified at the idea of 3 years vs 4 but for us, the buffer could be a couple years of community college -- where, let's face it, instructors are actually pretty dedicated to teaching and student outcomes. As opposed to some hotshot researcher who's only teaching to satisfy a tenure requirement.
I'm not categorically opposed to anything, but what you're describing sounds more like a transactional outcome than a mission-driven one. Sure, efficiency is great. But I can't count the committee hours I spent designing and revising a core curriculum that was effectively made obsolete by transfer credits. Then any assessment metrics measuring the effectiveness of the core were meaningless, because almost no one had completed the core in its entirety, the way it had been designed. If everything is just a requirement to "get out of the way," we're not talking about knowledge or truth seeking or anything related to intellectual growth. It's just a checklist.
I actually think it would be possible to preserve much of the traditional liberal arts while making reforms at the more advanced levels, years three and four, to prioritize internships. That's how each student might discover how to translate the value of an English or Theatre major into an industrial or nonprofit context -- before they have to actually join an applicant pool. There isn't really any problem with practical outcomes, so long as they don't replace the academic integrity of traditional disciplines. Study literature, history, language, religion -- know some shit -- and then start building some practical experience, growing a professional network, etc. It doesn't have to be zero sum either way.
I can't speak for all of Europe, or all opinions on the subject, but I have friends in Switzerland who bemoan that tracking into specialized career preparation starts really young there. It isn't so much that you take a final exam at the end of your (sometimes 13 instead of 12) years of public school to decide what you want to or can do; you might be locked into a vocational versus professional track already since 6th grade or so. And so it isn't only foundational liberal arts that students are better prepared in, it's also science, or economics, or whatever that student is expected to study at the next stage. So as Josh says, even more transactional than here.
I'm glad you also brought up community colleges. I started a career in IT/computer programming fairly late in life. My BA was in German and I had an MA in International Studies. After teaching myself some basic coding and working in telephone tech support for a few years I realized I needed to go back to school. I went to the College of Alameda (in Alameda, California) to satisfy some prerequisites. After having failed calculus as an undergrad, I was taught it by a guy who clearly delighted in being in the classroom; I also took a class in discrete mathematics and an intro course in computer science there -- all 3 courses were excellent. Penn State's Commonwealth campuses were held out as fulfilling our need for a community college system, but it hasn't worked out that way.
A good liberal arts education, the only worthwhile kind, is expensive.
I started grad school in 1997. At that time, there were already students with a vulgar-Foucaultian point of view that there is no such thing as truth, only narratives or power. They viewed themselves as agents for change, and they believed that any invocation of truth served the status quo (capitalism, colonialism, etc.). No one was considering what would happen if the vulgar-Foucaultian view became generalized and people outside the academy, including conservatives, adopted it.
Thank you, Duncan. I started my MA in 1997, as well, and was immediately confronted by Derrida and Foucault. I'm not certain that Foucault is quite as bad as you say -- I quite like his Birth of the Clinic, which I used in my dissertation. But, yes, I struggled with the idea that power and social constructions were the only (relative) truths.
Ironically, John Ellis published his prescient "Literature Lost" in 1997. In it he argues that postmodern relativism was a smokescreen for exceedingly didactic agendas. The goal, he says, was to destabilize the existing power structure, after which there would be a frenzy of competition among different ideological groups, which would not, themselves, be relativistic at all. Anti-racism and MAGA are two sides of that argument.
I never developed this as a proper theory, but I did write a couple of seminar papers as a master's student exploring physical homeostasis as a counterpoint to postmodernism. That is, the body has a kind of grammar, a set of parameters for truth that determines when health spins beyond its usual fluctuations and into a danger zone of imbalance. Homeostasis isn't absolute or fixed, it is a state of flux and compensation for inevitable imbalances (fatigue, hunger, etc.). But health isn't completely relative. Sacrifice sleep for too long, and you crash. Sometimes immunity can't stave off illness, and homeostasis can't be restored. In that case, the result is death -- its own truth, but not one anyone would want to claim is as equally valid as health.
I really do think that something like homeostasis would be required for the university to regain its footing: a restoration of an intellectual commons where there could be flux and disagreement, but where those differences would not reach a level of rancor or rigidity that would push the whole enterprise into a death spiral.
I feel all of this. I don’t remember when Maryland quit the ACC to join the Big10 (are you kidding me??), but the video of their new athletic (read: football) facility is offensive state-of-the-art propaganda. Including a throne where guys can pose in ermine robes and crown while they’re being recruited.
Was just having this conversation about WTF happened to higher ed after the ‘80s, when it was still reasonably affordable. Your piece breaks it down nicely. Add to that the arms race of building fancy new crap like luxury dorms and fitness centers, to be competitive with other schools and aid in recruiting. And the enormous layer of middle management that’s ballooned since the ‘90s. And, you’re so right about assessments and rubrics. It’s all bullshit, beholden to the idea that if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter. I’m lucky our little unit is still very values-forward. And tbh, our university president is a solid guy (former engineering professor and dean) who cares about academics, not primarily a bean-counter.
We have vulnerabilities for sure. We’re an R-1 institution, which means heavily dependent on federal dollars. I don’t have high hopes.
You and Ned (above) have longer memories than mine. College was affordable for me in the 90s because of Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, but also because the sticker price was only about $12K a year. So summer work could subsidize the difference. Perhaps Ned is right that the Reagan cuts set many of the dominoes in motion.
Glad you have a solid president. That counts for a great deal. I hope his tenure exceeds the average. I didn't mention this, but high turnover at the executive level (~5 years for deans and presidents) also undermines institutional health. And when you have executives like Brian Rosenberg, with PhDs in the humanities, publicly saying that their dissertations contributed little to the world, the core mission is irreparably lost.
I've sometimes likened the current situation to a family where the children have lost all respect for parental authority and, consequently, for each other. There needs to be a commonly shared belief in the institution itself, and in a unifying mission, for anyone to buy into their role in the enterprise.
I have no doubt Reagan bears part of the blame. Most (many? all?) state constitutions require balanced budgets, so they had limited choices -- cut programs, raise taxes. My program has a similar percentage of "professional track" faculty - 75% of us vs 25% tenure/tenure-track. It was the opposite in the 90s when I first started teaching there.
Yikes -- it's difficult to develop a rich academic culture if everyone is looking over their shoulder for the next round of layoffs or so burdened with teaching load that they can't make time for research or even socializing with colleagues. I remember how easy it was to find casual spaces to talk about teaching when I first joined the faculty at a private college in Iowa. By the time I left, there were so many demands on everyone's time that even scheduling lunch with a friend seemed like too much of a slice of the day. People need to feel secure and have some room to breathe for them to bring delight to their teaching.
Good point. It's been such a slow creep that I hardly noticed, but you're absolutely right, it is hard to have purely social get-togethers, even though I really like my colleagues and would love to hang out. Nobody has the time.
Terrific post in response to all the recent op-eds about “the end of higher education.” These trends have been in the works for decades, as you and others here note. One of the reasons I’m so concerned about the use of AI tools for written work in schools is not because the tools themselves are bad. It’s because administrative pressure to make AI part of the curriculum comes on the heels of at least two decades of “standardization” of writing instruction with canned assignments. Now, learning to write an essay is often framed as a boring task that can be outsourced to a machine. Boring essay assignments, sure - but not the kind of essay writing that’s deeply linked to critical thinking.
Thanks, Martha. Yes, AI is one form of standardization or a retooling of humanities disciplines to fit corporate purposes. One excellent example I can offer of how advanced humanities study yields superior results to any bot is archival research. When I taught a senior seminar, I took my students to the Cather Archive in Lincoln, where they handled physical artifacts from her travels (postcards, sketchbooks, and more), saw typescripts of her novels with her partner's, Edith Lewis's, handwritten edits, read her last will and testament, and perused her film contract for "A Lost Lady."
None of this is available to ChatGPT, and so the arguments they made and the conclusions they drew from primary materials were their own. What is the practical application of archival research into the work of Willa Cather? It doesn't map clearly onto a job at Wells Fargo, but it does cultivate discernment, the ability to develop expertise in a short time, and the ability to make a persuasive argument that synthesizes nuanced and diverse information. There's value in that, but it's not predetermined or obvious.
Great example of why hands-on archival research yields much richer writing. Yes.
Great observations.
I think many of these problems also have at their source the assumption that everyone must get a college degree to have a "good" job and be a "productive" citizen. There are lots of people who aren't interested in open inquiry about ideas, but would be excellent in a lot of jobs--including many white-collar desk jobs. Once universities were supposed to appeal to everyone, for the purpose of a particular kind of employment opportunity, it changed the product universities were selling from expanding one's own thoughts to enhancing one's own profit potential, with all the business values that implies. So of course we get the tyranny of spreadsheets reporting on deliverables in academia, once our framework becomes a business-values framework.
I wonder if this might be why this is less of a problem in European universities, which have different models for what university is for and how job training works. (The German system is a good example of one that provides lots of training for and specialization in trades, and where relatively few people go to university in pursuit of a "good job.") Or maybe the arrow of directionality points in the opposite direction: universities with their values existed for hundreds of years before Excel, and as a result had a better opportunity to mold the modern university culture to academic values, rather than be subjugated to business values.
I went to college to be a lawyer. There was no other reason that made sense to my working-class family in 1993. What I discovered was the life of the mind, and I claimed it rather stubbornly. That didn't make my life easier, but it did make it richer and somewhat easier to navigate social crack-ups like the one we're living through. Self-knowledge and adaptation are underrated qualities.
Perhaps you recall that my other path, which I very nearly chose, was stenography. That would have been far more lucrative than any other job I've held, and the top school for it in Denver, Colorado, offered me a full scholarship. It would have cost me nothing more than my own equipment. But the thought of that life crushed my spirit. I'd rather work with my hands.
I'm not an expert on the European model, but from what I hear, the same ills plague universities in the UK -- even in my beloved Prague, according to a senior professor I met while traveling there. Your last point is rather intriguing. But I think the older model still required some kind of subsidy, the way all serious art or research has -- it was just that the fundraising was considered a hidden necessity, not the core mission to trumpet from the rooftops.
To jump on the bandwagon that DEI went too far is easy enough and I know from personal experience not totally incorrect. But now its equal and opposite reaction will only do more damage. Meanwhile, I'm inclined to agree with Chris Hedges today ("Surrendering to Authoritarianism"). For all their shiny liberal credentials, Yale and other Ivy Leagues have always existed and still exist for this main reason: to produce a ruling class. Colombia's capitulation is best read in that light.
Quite right, Carol. Well said.
I think most of these issues, at their core, are a result of reduction of state funding. This applies to every state, although some more than others. Before states were first taken with the budget cutting hysteria of the 70s and 80s, a person could earn a degree from the UCal system for little more than the cost of books. Education was considered a public good. Pulling that funding away from states and externalizing the financial burden had predictable consequences. Higher tuition. The need to prove worth in the shrinking pot of money in order to compete for private dollars, all of which come with strings and agendas. The need for big donors, again, with agendas. For example, Phil Knight in Oregon is the single biggest private funder of education in the state. He also donates lots of money to Republicans. Other examples abound. The school choice moment, an excuse to privatize, privatize, and privatize without much, if any quality control oversight along with the homeschooling boom has meant exposure to complex issues that foster critical thinking is not mandatory. The advent of for-profit colleges: again, a result of the loss of state funding, affecting veterans and nontraditional students across the board. The Cuts in state funding are at the core of the labor issues, and to save money, state universities have left lines empty or filled them with adjuncts for a fraction of the cost and without traditional protections of TT faculty. I could go on forever. The death of a university education and everything that comes with an educated community to be seen as a public good worthy of tax dollars is at the core of everything. And you are right, Josh: this isn't new.
One more thing: the standardization of testing and curriculum as well as the increasing use of AI not only to write essays, but to grade them and to write up assignments are on this list, as well. No more public good worthy of tax dollars, only a tool to increase one's employment opportunities: why should states fund this? And why teach students how to think when thinking is not an asset?
The one place AI can’t touch is advanced writing and the novel thinking and synthesis of diverse sources it requires. In another comment I gave the example of archival research.
Smart discourse, Ben. Ned made many of these points above.
With regards to tenure, I like to describe one of my professors as being the prefect argument for and against tenure. His name is Kris Kobach, now Secretary of State for Kansas (and a graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School). He did not reveal his political leanings until he achieved tenure -- and virtually every other member of the faculty loathed him for his politics. Without the protection of tenure, he would have been fired purely for his political beliefs.
On the other hand, he knew that any criticism of him would be taken as political, and he abused that luxury. Classes would be canceled so he could make press conferences and news interviews. Instead of the standard essay exams, his finals were multiple choice to avoid any work in grading. Tenure was protecting a lazy and ineffective teacher.
(On a humorous note, several years ago he was sanctioned and required to take continuing education in civil procedure. Friends speculated that it was politically motivated. I simply replied "he graduated from YLS and worked as a professor before becoming an elected politician. When would he ever have learned something as prosaic as how to try a lawsuit? That's what graduates from third tier schools like where he taught do.")
Thanks for sharing -- powerful example. Everyone knows about the bad apples who abuse the tenure system. The question -- which I'm not sure can be answered anecdotally -- is whether Kobach is the exception or the rule.
My feeling is that tenure has been essential not only for academic freedom but also for financial security. Academics on average are paid so poorly compared to other professions that committing to higher ed requires enormous sacrifices: poverty wages during graduate school (and forfeited earnings while other peers are building wealth) and then compensation that often hovers around the minimum in MIT metrics for a sustainable livelihood. Academic families aren't able to survive on a single income in many places -- this is only true at R1 universities and then only for leading scholars. So the financial commitment that tenure represents provides a baseline of stability for people who sacrifice for a calling.
It makes zero financial sense to make all the sacrifices graduate school requires and then enter a year-by-year or 3-year renewable limbo. But the same can now be said of industry: in exchange for an exorbitantly expensive education, graduates must accept debt and dependency on corporate employers who offer no security, either. A family can relocate across the country, buy expensive real estate in Seattle, and then get laid off a year later by Amazon.
Not sure what the answers there are, but increasingly a lot of Americans exist in precarity or with a likely chance of precarity. This is one thing that tenure has prevented in the past.
Anecdotes certainly can't be a basis for policy, but in my experience, Kobach was the only professor I had (and I have two bachelor's in history and chemistry, a minor in Classics, and a law degree) who abused tenure to be a bad teacher. On the other hand, he was also the only professor who used tenure as a shield against unpopular opinions either; making snarky comments about Dick Cheney's hunting accident hardly constitutes intellectual bravery.
For the professors I had (and the one I know socially) tenure is completely about financial security, not intellectual freedom. My conservative tenured friend still has to dance around the eggshells of his woke students; at best, tenure lets him relax to demi-pointe from being on pointe. As we've seen, tenure is no protection from the hounds if they bay loudly enough for blood.
And I fully agree that the employment situation of university teachers is a disgrace. Glenn Reynolds has written that perhaps the reason so many people in academia and entertainment decry capitalism is because those two sectors are the most exploitative, least meritocratic, and zero-sum in the economy, and so people in those sectors assume everywhere else must be worse. I'm inclined to agree with him. Even law, which has first year graduates who can make $160K/year in the bowels of Big Law for partners who make millions or $25/hr with no benefits as document reviewers, isn't as exploitative as paying Ph.D grads a few hundred bucks a semester to adjunct. I could buy a cheap house as a document reviewer; no one is getting a mortgage as an adjunct.
The whole education system needs an overhaul, but I think it's important to be clear on what we're trying to accomplish. If the goal is simply to provide greater financial security to professors, that can be done without lifetime tenure -- signing professors for eight or ten year contracts would work just as well.
Good post. Just a question on a side issue here. You write “as if we could just go back to reading Paradise Lost the way it was taught in the 1950s and ignore the explosion of ethnic American literature in the last two hundred years. “ I’m not sure i quite understand this. In 1950 they didn’t read Milton like they did in 1920 nor 1870 etc. nor - I imagine- was Milton ever taught the same in the us and the uk etc. by the same token of course you can’t read Milton in 2025 as in 1950, and not just because of important scholarship since then, but because each generation relates to great works in its own manner. But what I frankly don’t understand is the emphasis on “ethnic literature” and why it should mean that we should stop reading Milton, or somehow *fundamentally* change how we read him in a way that isn’t encompassed in the general universalist observation about how each generation and society revisits great works in its own way?
An excellent question. I was referring rather unclearly to the expansion of the Western canon in the twentieth century and a gradual movement away from "the classics." You are right that Milton has been read differently at different times, but I don't think those differences have been so radical across places and times. There have been more recent movements to dispense with Western history altogether (see Reed College https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college-course-lectures-canceled-after-student-protesters-interrupt-class).
One of the outgrowths of the 1900s was reading multiculturally, sometimes reading against the grain of former classics, or applying newer lenses from gender studies or queer theory to older texts. So in that sense I don't think we can return to Milton in the way that conservatives seem to be advocating for, although just what Rufo and others mean by a "classical" approach to the humanities remains ill-defined. Certainly I am no fan of a strictly theory-based approach to literature. I meant only to highlight the difficulty of returning to or restoring an "intellectual commons" where differing views might peaceably converse. Many of these struggles over curriculum have become zero sum.
Not sure if that helps or confuses things further?
I agree 100% of this article, fantastic. As always, I focus on cost. Public colleges never should've been allowed to price themselves 40-50% past the rate of inflation. Yes, I know state budgets got cut, but don't price people out, especially the middle and lower classes.
Many pundits and presidents have proclaimed college as the key to success. If this is true, why do they make it so hard to afford? I still believe all state colleges and community colleges should be free to their residents.
Yes, quite right -- so many aspects of truth seeking only become possible if prohibitive cost is removed. That includes both rigorous academic experiences, such as archival research, that have practical byproducts but really require an independent integrity, as well as self-exploration and even learning as a form of play (why not take this elective class in theatre).
As I said in response to another comment, I think a great many students from both rural and urban places would be willing to accept much more spartan accommodations in exchange for learning opportunities. At my former employer, room and board were money makers for the college and were not covered by any form of financial aid. During graduate school I lived an incredibly ascetic life -- rice and beans, etc -- which I accepted at the time as necessary for the opportunity to complete my PhD. I'm sympathetic to the calls for better compensation for graduate students and have written about the financial sacrifices that PhDs make, some of which reverberate for a lifetime. But knowledge seeking and skill development do not require material comfort, and I am surprised that so few schools give any attention to this; we are told that there is no money for things like visiting authors or artistic residencies, but there is money for posh dorms and entertainment and other unnecessary add-ons.
If the university is to recover from the current attacks and its long demise, it needs to be more welcoming to students who don't need more than basic necessities to complete their studies.
Thoughtful and investigative post borne of your own experience. Like most, I don’t have answers to the questions—but of your key points I’d suggest that the costs/return are a primary driver of—and also outcome of—the other points. As you pointed out so well, the cost of the education doesn’t equal the quality of it—but rather points to the access created by it. Access to what?—the corporate and government gatekeepers mentioned in your other key point.
Great essay Josh.
Thanks, Dee. There is another way of looking at it, which is Ned's point earlier in the thread: institutions were supported and encouraged to grow for many years with federal support, and the Reagan cuts created a void that led to the other choices. Just as a McDonald's cheeseburger is artificially cheap because commodity beef is subsidized (compared to grass-fed locally sourced beef), you could say that universities were artificially cheap -- or legitimately cheap -- for a time because of our collective support.
I don't think many universities can survive long with a crass revenue/expense calculus. Some disciplines, like the arts and humanities, have always required subsidy. Whether we think they are important enough to collectively support them is another matter, and the disciplines themselves have a responsibility to persuade the public of their usefulness. I think for many years the idea of a thoughtful person as someone who was literate, capable of interpreting complex texts and writing incisively about them, widely versed in history and culture, was widely celebrated. Even seen as a mark of sophistication.
But you're quite right that many universities are in the selectivity race, and what they are selling is a hyped up club membership.
Perhaps Reagan was the spark of some change way back then. Clearly it’s a more complex problem than can be blamed on a single President’s agenda of deregulation—but I guess it’s a convenient target. As we’ve seen recently, a federally supported education system doesn’t bode well for the quality of outcomes.
Anyway I liked how you presented the myriad challenges.
I beg to differ: the American university system has been the envy of the world only because of federal and state support. The more limited those funds, the poorer the entire system becomes. It's reached a broken state, no doubt, but it was not that way for your generation or mine.
This is correct. Every year, more and more universities from China, the UK, and other places move up the list of "best universities." I use quotes only because some of the criteria are pretty subjective. That said, it's clear as public funding drops, so does the prestige or American universities.
Very good post. On a somewhat related topic (apologies if you did write about it and I missed it) I would be interested in reading your thoughts on the infiltration of academia by the Chinese Communist Party. (Mainly through Confucius Institutes) This is one possible area where government and academia could overlap and maybe even clash, especially given a lot of the surprises of the last few weeks. One of the easiest things academia can do is distance itself as much as possible from the Chinese Communist Party; otherwise the government will have a ready reason to interfere in academia's affairs since one can genuinely cite national security in this instance.
I will answer your questions soon, I now finally have time to get to long overdue emails. I don't need to tell you that the life of a parent is busy! (Hope your children are all healthy and well, by the way!)
Felix, I have no grasp of what you're suggesting and no knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party in my own academic experience. A cursory glance at Confucius Institutes suggests that there aren't many, and that they have not recently enjoyed federal support. Perhaps there's more to it, but it's new to me.
Agreed with all of this--but I also think that one underemphasized cause of this might be a lack of TT faculty participation in shared governance and union work, where they actually have the tools to push back against the trends you identify. It can be really difficult to find any faculty who are willing to sit on, chair, and work on committees, and those who do aren't always committed to the vision of education you argue for. I don't know if this is the same at other institutions, but the sense I get from my current institution is that a lot of the corporatization happens because few faculty members are bothering to attend the (admittedly dull) meetings where these sorts of decisions are made. These problems aren't 100% the fault of faculty--but they aren't 0% the fault of faculty either. I wonder if some sort of groundswell of investment in shared governance might be part of the solution.
In a faculty position since 2012 and yes to all of the above. Especially the corporate takeover of higher education. Faculty keep losing in their fight against it.
Josh, you did a superb job of writing about the value of education. In my life, I hear and participate a lot about university education and what value it brings. ROI is essentially the discussion, and job placement. But in my limited experience, those who have sought education and life experience bring more life and purpose to their environments.